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Thursday, 27 June 2013

Magic Thursday: World Building - Defining Magic in the world of Shadow's Rise

Thank you
to the Darksiders for hosting me here once more. This week, I thought I’d talk
a bit about some of the things I considered when developing and writing about
the magic of Tzamesch, where the Shadow Series is set.

Some
writers build their work with encyclopaedic accuracy before they ever start a
story. I have never been able to do it that way; I find it stifles the story
process for me. Instead, I use a combination of learning about my world through
storytelling, and then working out the logic behind what I’ve ‘seen’ happen in
the story and writing the rules so that I have consistency in the rules
governing the world.

For
instance, when I first started writing Tzamesch, I knew I wanted there to be
something a little bit different in the way magic operated. I didn’t like the
idea of wizards having to learn a set number of spells at the beginning of the
day, like they are required to do in some roleplaying systems. I didn’t like
the idea of wielding magic being so exhausting that even the smallest spell
took a great physical toll. I didn’t think all magic wielders should work the
same way, but I also didn’t know exactly how to describe what I wanted until I’d
used magic in the story.

It soon
became clear that magic, at least for the most common kind of magic-user, was a
kind of energy or force that could be tapped into and shaped. This meant I had
to answer the question of why not everyone was a magic user. I decided it was
genetic—not everyone has the capability to sense, feel or draw on the magical
energy around them, and not everyone who can, is able to shape it. People are
born with different abilities, and magical sensitivity and shaping was one of
those.

As I wrote,
I also found that there were different kinds of magic, with elemental magic
playing a pivotal role in the story. I also learned that the difference had to
be explained or shown so that the reader could focus more on the story than on
wondering what the importance of those differences was. I decided elemental
magic was different to ‘normal’ magic, but only to a small degree.

I drew on
known and accepted understandings of elemental magic in our own world and
decided that elemental magic on Tzamesch means more than earth, air, wind or
fire. Everything is an element: stones, gems, decay, death… and power, which is
also central to the story’s villain. This led to me deciding that there had
been a pantheon before the one existing in the book, and that led to me asking
more questions as I explored yet another form of magic—that of clerics and
priests.

I had to
ask: How are gods and goddesses formed? Where do they come from? Where do they
go when they die? How do they die? and What role do mortals play in the
life-cycle of a god?

With the
books having such strong elements of deities and their interference in mortal
affairs, these were questions that required an answer in order for the story to
move forward.

I decided
that what a person worships is instrumental in giving rise to a deity. This
meant that while there were now human deities who represented different facets
of the human world, because humans saw those facets to be important: night, balance,
fishermen, coastlines, death, invention, plague, pestilence and so forth. In
earlier times, however, humans worshiped the elements around them: the earth
that helped them grow their food, the air that brought storms and rain, the
water that helped their crops grow, and the fire that cooked their food and
drove off predators. Everything important to their survival was given a place.
As society advanced and changed, so did the kinds of things humans worshipped.

The worship
of stone led to the discovery of metal, which led to the rise in importance of
smiths and inventors, which led to a gradual increase in the worship of a god
of smiths and a god of inventors and brought about a decline in the worship of
metal as an element. Likewise, an increase in the worship of a god of masons led
to a decrease in the worship of the element of stone. And so it went.

As the new
deities grew into being and developed a place in the human pantheon, the old
elemental deities withdrew from the world, and elemental magic became a thing
of the past. No longer the domain of priests, the power of the elements could
still be sensed by some, in the same way that magic could be sensed. Without a
deific link, I decided that the ability to sense and use magic and the more
specific ability to sense and use elemental power were related, but that the
elemental sense was rarer.

I also
revisited my idea about magic being tiring, and decided that if particularly
difficult spells were cast, or if the caster had to repeatedly cast spells,
then magic was tiring, and again came
the constant question ‘Why?’. It took me some time to answer that, but I worked
out that the reason wizards who attempt a magic beyond their ability, or who
draw on spells over a prolonged period, collapse or die is because they eventually
end up drawing on the magic inside themselves, for it takes a degree of magic
to sense and use magic. Spell-casters are, in essence, magical creatures, and
magic gives their souls a different flavour.

…and this
flavour is what enables other magical creatures to hunt them—another important
element in the story as the nemesis threatening the world uses his undead to
hunt wizards so he can use the power stored in their souls to fuel his escape
attempt.

So, how
does this illustrate world-building, and why is it important?

Everything
interlinks. Important story elements have a background. There is a reason why
elementals are involved, and a reason why the villain of the piece has
difficulty finding the right kind of soul to power his escape. Everything
serves the purpose of moving the story forward, giving something important to
the story an understandable reason for existing, or giving the readers an
insight into the world’s mechanics.

Some of this
background never appears in the book itself, but me knowing it exists helps me
give each occurrence a commonality so that the reader can start to make sense
of the world and feel a little more at home in it. This means the reader can
focus more on the story than on wondering why things work as they do in the
characters world. It reduces the chance they’ll be pulled out of the story
because something didn’t work as they expected, because it was different to the
last time they saw it. It helps the reader become immersed in your world, and
enjoy it more.

C.M. Simpson spent the first twenty years of her life living in different parts of Queensland
and the Northern Territory. Her father was a teacher who liked to travel, so he
took teaching appointments in all kinds of places. To cope with the constant travel, C.M. wrote stories, drawing on the different landscapes she encountered and giving a
hyper-active imagination somewhere to run. Seeing so many different places gave
her a lot of food for thought as she stepped into the world of adulthood and she never stopped writing and exploring the worlds in
her head.